Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Is machine vision all it’s cracked up to be?

It’s my impression that food inspection is a very difficult task for machine vision, given that “good” product can exhibit considerable variety in appearance. However, eggs would seem to be an exception in that they should be somewhat uniform. Perhaps that’s why Netherlands-based Moba is able to offer the “Egginspector,” a system that can detect, “feather on egg, excreta black, excreta white, egg yolk etc.”

I would have liked more information on the system – how many cameras are used, how the egg is presented to the camera, for example – and a video would be really nice, but even without those aids, this is yet another great example of machine vision moving beyond industrial manufacturing.